The late 20th century has rediscovered the period that constitutes the childhood of our civilization: the Middle Ages. Long accustomed to ignoring that period and even to treating it with contempt, people are now looking back upon it with nostalgia. They are even trying to learn something from it – something that medieval man apparently knew and that his 20-century descendant has forgotten. In this article I will try to answer the question why this is happening in our days.

Medieval Accomplishments⤒🔗

The period of the Middle Ages forms the beginning of our western (or European) civilization. Roughly, it runs from about AD 500 to about 1500. The opening date stands for the fall of Rome; the closing one for Europe's discovery of America, the protestant reformation, the rise of capitalism, and other important events which historians believe signify the beginning of the Modern Age.

The medieval period is a long one, having lasted some 1000 years. It's twice as long as what has succeeded it, the period from 1500 up to our own times. For that reason one would expect the Middle Ages to be well known by anyone interested in the history of his or her civilization. That is not necessarily the case, however. Traditionally, history courses at schools have tended to move rather quickly over the Middle Ages. Occasionally they were dismissed, in toto, as “The Dark Ages.” And even if they were not, the tendency has been to bestow far less attention and enthusiasm on the Middle Ages than on what came before them, that is, on the classical world of Greece and Rome, and especially on what came after, our modern period.

Why is this so? The reason cannot be that the people of the Middle Ages did not accomplish great things. They did even if it took them long centuries of slow advances punctuated by terrible setbacks. But in that lengthy and difficult process, guided at every step by the Christian Church, our medieval ancestors did much of which they could be very proud. Look at this incomplete list of their accomplishments. They overcame the barbarism and destruction left by the collapse of Rome; they preached the gospel along the length and breadth of the continent, building churches, monasteries, and schools in the process; they formed what was essentially a Christian civilization; they restored and greatly expanded the urban centres, the manufacture, and the trade that had collapsed with the Roman empire; they were good (often even better than the Romans) at inventing technology, and they came up with imaginative innovations in agriculture; they created countries and developed legal and political systems that are still around; and they produced great works of art, architecture, philosophy, and literature. They even invented the university.

Renaissance and Reformation←⤒🔗

The question returns: why the widespread contempt for the Middle Ages by those who inherited that period's achievements? Part of the answer lies in the views of the people of the Italian Renaissance and those of the Reformation. The Renaissance came at the end of the Middle Ages (it was wedged in between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age), but it had a very different view of life than the Middle Ages had had. Most Renaissance people still professed themselves to be Christians, but they also tended to be quite worldly, and on the whole they felt they had far more in common with the classical pagan Greeks and Romans than with their own medieval Christian forebears.

It was these Renaissance people that gave the preceding 1000-year period the name “Middle Age.” It was a term of contempt. It conveyed the idea that there were two great ages: that of the pre-Christian Greek and Roman classics, and that of the Renaissance itself, which (so the people of the time proudly proclaimed) had brought about the revival of the ancient classical tradition. (The word Renaissance means rebirth.) The 1000 years between the fall of Rome and the rise of the Renaissance constituted, for the people of the Renaissance, a regrettable and embarrassing period of superstition, ignorance, and great cultural decline – something that deserved no name and could best be referred to simply as “the middle age.”

The Reformers continued this attitude and helped perpetuate it. Their reasons were different. The Renaissance was especially uncomfortable with the large role religion still played in the medieval period. The Reformers, who fought the secularizing trends of the Renaissance, were one with the Middle Ages in wanting a fully religious society. Their complaint was about the corruption of medieval religion and the apostasy of the late-medieval Roman Catholic Church.

This is not to say that men like Luther and Calvin found nothing good in their medieval heritage. As we shall see later, they did. The fact remains that the picture of the Middle Ages as left by the Reformation was generally negative. And until recently that picture has not substantially been changed by the heirs of the Reformation.

The Romantic Revival←⤒🔗

The Middle Ages fared particularly badly during the 18th-century Enlightenment or Age of Reason. Hatred of church and religion at that time was so strong that no good at all could be found in the medieval period, which Enlightenment intellectuals described as barbarous, violent, irrational, and priest-ridden. It was not until the Romantic period (during and after the French Revolution) that the Middle Ages at last found some recognition.

The Romantics rebelled against the rationalism of the previous period. They saw before their eyes the results of an exclusive reliance on reason, untempered by recourse to religion, history, the emotions, or even common sense. That exclusive reliance on reason had brought about the horrors of the French Revolution with its bloodbaths and Reign of Terror. It had also led to the Industrial Revolution with its urban slums, its terrible treatment of the working poor, including women and children, and its degradation of the environment.

The reliance on reason having caused all these evils, according to the Romantics, reason had to be demoted. Therefore, if for the Enlightenment it had been the mind that defined man, for the Romantics it was the heart, the emotions, intuition, faith. For them religion (any religion) was a better source of truth than reason. Nor was it only their hatred of rationalism that caused the Romantics to look with favour upon the Middle Ages. Their love of country (Romantics tended to be nationalistic) and their interest in its childhood also inclined them to see the Middle Ages as a time worthy of attention. So did their interest in the primitive, in nature, and in the irrational.

The Romantic Movement came and went, but its peculiar sensibilities keep popping up time and again. Furthermore, the movement unleashed a flood of works on the Middle Ages, one that still shows no sign of retreating. Some of these books were the work of romanticizers and/or novelists and often (though not always) contained as much fiction as fact. The majority, however, was and is being written by specialists, and much of it is of superior quality. At least among historians the Middle Ages are no longer terra incognita, an unknown land.

History as Our Teacher←⤒🔗

Does the memory of the Romantic Movement, together with this spate of publications on the Middle Ages by historians, novelists, and even writers of detective stones, explain the renewed interest in the medieval period? Or do we have to turn the question around and ask whether there is something in the air – as was also the case during the Romantic revival – that draws professional historians as well as novelists and lay men to the Middle Ages? I think that it is the latter.

It is often the case that when we study a historical period we do so because of a present need. We will go to the past, in such instances, for one of two reasons. One is that we blame present problems on the past and that we study and write about that past hoping that we may learn what to avoid. A lot of anti-Columbians, as you may remember, write about the quincentennial of Columbus's arrival in America in this spirit. They criticize Columbus and all he stood for, and they warn contemporaries about the evils he and his successors have brought to the American continent.

The other and opposite reason why we go to the past is the hope that we may find answers to present problems, or, at the least, that past developments may offer us comfort and encouragement in present trials. That, I think, explains the interest in the Middle Ages both during the Romantic Movement and in our own days.

Huizinga's Waning of the Middle Ages←⤒🔗

The example is a work by the well-known Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga, entitled The Waning of the Middle Ages, which is still one of the classics on late medieval and Renaissance history. It was published in English in 1924, but in its Dutch version (entitled Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen – Autumn Tide of the Middle Ages) it dates from 1919. It originated, therefore, in the period just following World War I, when there was a widespread belief that Western civilization was in danger of collapse. The tone had been set by Spengler's Decline of the West, published the previous year, 1918.

Huizinga was no Spenglerian. In fact, he more than once made it a point to attack Spengler's fatalism and doomsday attitude. Huizinga nevertheless – both by temperament and as a result of personal and public experiences – tended, like Spengler, to see life and history more as a process of decline than as one of renewal. While many previous historians had looked at the Renaissance (including the northern Renaissance) as a period of rebirth and the beginning of the modern age, Huizinga showed it as one of decline: as the waning, the autumnal, the dying phase of the Middle Ages. And that interpretation has touched a chord in our century. Huizinga's book is still compulsory reading for students of both the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance.